The Mindset Behind Success with Mohamed (Mo) Ahmed

Shaheen: Welcome to the Versa Business Tips podcast. I’m your host, founder and CEO of Versa Business System, Shaheen Masum. We’re here with a tech entrepreneur today who helps people scale and grow their businesses. Mohamed, how are you doing today, brother?

Mohamed: How are you, Shaheen? Great! I’m doing well.

Shaheen: Doing well, thanks for joining us today, Mo.

Mohamed: Thank you for having me.

Shaheen: Absolutely. So for those out there that don’t know who you are, tell us a little about yourself and your brand, Boundless Founder.

Mohamed: Absolutely. So I’m a serial entrepreneur and a book author. I started my career as an engineer in software. I worked at Amazon and Microsoft for a long time, specifically in their cloud offerings. Then I got the startup bug at a certain point, and I decided to co-found my own company. That was a few years ago, and with lots of work, lots of dark days, and some sunny days, we were able to endure the journey, go through the high highs and the low lows. We got lucky and sold the company after multiple failed attempts. I decided to write a book about it, and from that point, I wanted to take what I learned and help entrepreneurs build resilience and the right mindset to first get started and then scale their businesses and startups.

Shaheen: Absolutely. You brought up a couple of points. Mindset obviously is half the battle, right? But you also mentioned luck. You said, “We got lucky and eventually sold the company.” Was it really luck, or did you create the luck?

Mohamed: You know, it’s definitely a mix of both. First of all, you need to stay in the game long enough so that you get lucky—that’s number one. Number two, you need to keep your eye and mind open to what sometimes may look like huge setbacks or problems that you’re going through, but you can turn them into opportunities. We hear from others, and I personally went through that, and that’s why mindset, as you just mentioned, is 50% of your success, if not more.

Shaheen: Sometimes you have to rebuild from scratch. Sometimes you just got to start over, right? Like, you just can’t give up.

Mohamed: Actually, that’s what happened for me in my startup. When I got started, we pivoted three times. When you pivot, you almost rip the piece of paper you had and start from scratch. That’s what we did, and sometimes you have to even rebuild your team. You get the intuition or realize that you need a different skill set, so you basically hit the reset button, which is really hard for entrepreneurs, especially if you’re invested in your idea. Again, mindset would drive a lot of that, and this is one of the reasons why I decided to write my book, “The Inside Out Entrepreneur.”

Shaheen: We’re in a huge tech revolution right now. Technology is just booming. When you think about the internet age, and now we’re going into the AI age, there are just so many new companies day in and day out. It’s people like you who have done it successfully—successfully meaning you exited, right? There are a lot of people that build businesses and end up with nothing. They worked really hard, they built a business, but they really just worked for their business. They made some money, and then it had no value at the end. For you to be able to build a software company, restart it multiple times, and then eventually exit for a lump sum of money is a huge accomplishment because most companies won’t do that. What is it, 95% of startups fail in the first year? A lot of the times it’s because they give up, but I think a big part of it is bad advice, following bad advice, or not getting advice—not having a mentor, not having people to bounce ideas off, or a community to meet with and listen to. So it’s great that you’ve done that and now you’re putting out a series of books about that experience, is that right?

Mohamed: Correct, yes.

Shaheen: Explain to me how the first one, how that process goes.

Mohamed: Absolutely. So the series of books are focused on what I call building the entrepreneur. If you take a look at the entrepreneurial ecosystem, you have the entrepreneur, you have the VC money, you have the other helping factors that exist around it, but the most critical piece is the entrepreneur. It’s the person who brings all of these together and makes it work. They’re the ones who convert the spark in their head into a reality—a multi-million dollar business.

If you take a look at most of the books out there or the literature out there, they focus on how to do more sales, how to do more marketing. This is important, you still need that, but what you need to really focus on is how to make use of all of this together with the proper perspective.

I’ll share a personal story about that. Before I started my first startup, I read all the books about building a business, how to do sales, marketing, build the team, and validate the product. I even took some certificates and did higher studies in that area. Yet, in the first two years, I did everything wrong that they said you should not do. Midway, I was saying, “Well, what’s happening? Something’s wrong.”

The problem is when I started to look inward and focus on myself, I realized I was always thinking, “I’m going to run out of money at this time,” “I’m going to fail because of this,” “Something bad is going to happen.” It was actually a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Shaheen: 100%. Those negative thoughts produce negative results.

Mohamed: Exactly. That’s what I’ve seen when I started talking with other entrepreneurs. I remember saying to one entrepreneur, “Look, I just need you to tell me what’s going on with you. Don’t give me the LinkedIn updates that everything is good and you’re hiring. Tell me the real updates.” I realized that everyone is mentally struggling, and that would make them unfortunately pay a monumental cost to build a business. Even if you’re successful, you may end up losing yourself or losing a lot in between, and that doesn’t need to happen.

That’s the focus of my first book. The title actually explains this a bit: “The Inside Out Entrepreneur.” My point of view, sharing lots of stories there, is that being an entrepreneur has to start from inside out. Once you master that part, you’re almost 50% there. It’s not a one-shot, do it and then forget about it process.

Shaheen: You’ve got to continually learn and evolve. I was talking to someone earlier, and they said your business can only grow as much as you yourself grow. Once you stop growing, then your business reaches its ceiling. You are the cap of your business. So if you stop growing and learning internally as yourself, your business will do the same.

Mohamed: Exactly. So that’s one part, and in the book, I’m breaking it down into different elements. There’s the mental element, which is the resiliency versus robustness, and there are so many things and how to define these. I’m trying to use some engineering analogies there with stories.

Then there’s also another part that many entrepreneurs ignore. I’ll give you an example: your family. I believe that entrepreneurs’ families are as unique as the entrepreneurs themselves. They need to be in the journey with you, and being in the journey means they need to know about the business and how entrepreneurship is different.

Shaheen: 100%. Too many entrepreneurs focus on this work-life balance. Forget work-life balance—it should be one! This business is what is building this family, right? This business is why we can eat together at the dinner table every day or why we can go on these trips every year.

Mohamed: Completely agree. The family should know what’s going on, what we’re doing. I’ll give you an example: when we raised our first $5 million for the company, my wife said, “We’ve almost made it.” That reflected that she needed to know about what was going on, what to expect, because it doesn’t mean that much. Companies raise hundreds of millions and end up bankrupt.

So setting the expectations—for example, when you sell your company, it doesn’t also mean that once you sign, everything is done. It’s a process after that. That would set the expectations and ease the pressure that family members have on themselves and on you. They may not know, and then there’s also the pressure that we put on ourselves because we feel the pressure from them.

Shaheen: 100%. I realize this—I’m newly married. I got married in April, and that was one of the first things my father told me. My mom and dad are still married—they celebrate 40 years in July. In this day and age, that’s unheard of. One of the first things my dad said was, “You’ve got to always make sure you’re open about the business and the finances with your wife. She needs to understand at all times because it’s very volatile.” He said, “But that’s not just for her, it’s for you as well, because otherwise you will put stress on yourself by trying to keep her hidden from the day-to-day problems.”

Mohamed: Exactly. Sometimes major events are inevitable, and you have to share them with your family. It’s a team, right? It’s a team at the end of the day.

One day, we were about to be acquired, and everything was almost done. The acquiring company looked at our source code, our finances, interviewed most of our team, and just two hours before signing the LOI, they backed off for reasons outside of their control.

I wanted to tell my wife but didn’t know how to tell her because we were just dreaming of that day. We were waiting for that day for all of us. I decided to wait for a week, and it was definitely hard for me for that week, but it’s really important to stage how you communicate all that. You need to heal yourself first so that you’re able to help others, especially your family, because otherwise, events like these can create really big cracks in your family.

Again, if we zoom back, this is just one dimension that my book talks about, just to give your listeners an example. For you as an entrepreneur, you need to look at different aspects of conditioning. You and I were talking about it before the show—it’s like how mountaineers condition themselves. Any mountaineer, no matter how experienced, needs to condition themselves before they head to the summit. The bigger and more challenging it is, the more preparation you need. It doesn’t matter how many times you’ve done it before; you have to prepare.

So the book talks about how you need to condition yourself. If you do that, you’re going to have the right mindset.

Shaheen: Exactly.

Mohamed: You’re going to have all the conditions around you set properly. It’s not going to be easy—it’s still never going to be easy—but it’s going to be more rewarding. It’s going to help you grow. Rather than becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy to fail, it hopefully becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy to grow and become something much bigger.

Then the rest of my series, which is my next book, talks about those timeless strategies that any entrepreneur needs to have in mind—how to become what I call a “super entrepreneur.” If you think about it, as you were mentioning earlier, most businesses fail in the first year. There’s one reason in addition to mindset: unfortunately, a lot of entrepreneurs do not actually build a business. Sometimes they build a job, something that’s either a job or they build something for someone else.

Coming from high-tech startups that usually raise from VCs, VCs have their own model and way to push startups to grow. The way VCs make money—just for everyone here—they make the real money in 10 years from now, hopefully when your startup is successful and either goes IPO or gets acquired. But the question is: how do they show everyone that they made the right decision in between?

Very simple—they shoot for higher valuation of your startup. They want to go back to their board and tell them, “I invested in Shaheen’s company. It was worth $10 million last year, and we own 10%. Now this year, Shaheen raised another round, and it’s worth $20 million, so our $1 million is now worth $2 million on paper.”

As a result of this inherent model within the VC industry, VCs most of the time put tremendous pressure on entrepreneurs to make sure their company looks more valuable. As you and I know, this is not necessarily a healthy way to grow your business. Sometimes growing your business means you need to go slow because you need to build a foundation, or sometimes you need to focus on the right fundamentals, not the number of non-paying users. You need to make sure there’s money flowing in.

That’s actually what most entrepreneurs miss, unfortunately, especially first-time entrepreneurs. They go into that game of “How do I make sure that my company is worth more?” because this is how they get the money from VCs, and they forget the fundamentals.

Shaheen: It’s funny because I think a lot of the times it’s focusing on the things that don’t matter at the wrong time. For example, I was speaking with this guy the other day. He said, “I started a junk removal company.” He paid this company all this money to get an LLC, a business bank account, a website, and all that. I asked, “Do you have a truck?” “Yes.” “Do you have customers?” “Well, no, I’m waiting for the LLC and the website.” I said, “Bro, you don’t need any of that. You need customers. When you get customers, once you know you have a business, then you get the website and the LLC.”

You can do this as a solopreneur right now. Any business—you don’t need a business bank account and an LLC and a website and all that stuff. Get some customers first! I think a lot of the times we try to put the cart before the horse, especially first-time entrepreneurs, or not so much first-time entrepreneurs but first-time success. The first time an entrepreneur is like, “Oh, I got something here! I got some good money coming in!” and then we start trying to put the cart before the horse and do things too soon.

Mohamed: Absolutely. 100% agree. It’s the same in software. I really like two analogies that Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn, uses. One of them is saying building a startup is like jumping off a cliff, and your main goal while you’re in free fall is to build an airplane that will take off before you crash to the ground.

Shaheen: That’s true!

Mohamed: And the main problem is that a lot of entrepreneurs focus on the decorative signs—to continue with the analogy. They focus on what the seats should be: leather or carpet? But what they need is two wings and an engine. That’s the most important thing. And then when they take off, now they can start thinking about the other details. They might not even need a plane; they may just need a parachute or something like that.

Shaheen: I love that analogy. It’s so true.

Mohamed: Exactly. And that’s what unfortunately lots of entrepreneurs fall into. Not because they’re not experienced enough—a lot of them have lots of experience—but in the noise of everyday business and everything you need to do, it’s everybody else saying, “What do you have this? Do you have that?” It’s all the noise from social media and the news.

Shaheen: There’s so much noise out there. Years ago, you didn’t have that. Some people didn’t even have a phone at the business. Unless somebody was walking in, you didn’t get the noise.

Mohamed: Absolutely. Another quote that I really love, which we usually use in the product-market fit discussion: if you’re not ashamed of the first release of your product, you probably released too late.

Shaheen: Yes! 100%. I love that because at the end of the day, you try to make it absolutely perfect, but it’s never going to be perfect. Just get it out. If it’s something some people will buy, get it out. It’s the first release—get it out.

Mohamed: Exactly. If it works and it’s going to solve people’s problems, get it out, rush it out as quickly as possible.

Shaheen: Exactly. Of course, if it’s dangerous, you want to slow those things down, but if it works and is going to solve people’s problems, get it out as quickly as possible. People slow it down like, “Oh, maybe it should be red instead of blue” or “Maybe we should add the logo on this side.” It’s just like, come on!

Mohamed: Exactly. And that’s coming especially from experienced entrepreneurs, technical entrepreneurs coming from big enterprises. They’re building their product with the same mindset of the big enterprise they’re coming from, and they don’t have that luxury. The big enterprise still has thousands of products making money every day—they can go slow.

Shaheen: Absolutely.

Mohamed: They can afford that in many different ways because they already have the cash cow. That’s also another thing that entrepreneurs need to keep in mind: your only asset as an entrepreneur building a new startup is speed. That’s it—not the money, because enterprises have more money than you; not the smarts, because they have lots of smart people; not even the market insight, because they’re probably also seeing what you’re seeing. It’s just you being able to move fast.

That actually brings me back to the mindset as the driver of that. Let me share an interesting story. My startup started as a software optimization company. If you’re deploying something to the cloud, how do I make it cheaper and perform better? We started building the product. I made lots of mistakes, but anyway, at month number six, I got an email from AWS.

At the beginning of the six months, we had a $100,000 credit from AWS. In month six, AWS sent us an email saying, “How are you going to pay the $25,000 that you owe us?” I asked, “What’s going on? Why is that?” They said, “You overused the infrastructure, and now you owe us $25,000.” It’s ironic because we are a company that’s supposed to help others optimize their software, and yet we made the mistake that we’re calling everyone not to do!

One of the things that really slowed me down significantly—it took me almost four weeks just to mentally recover and start thinking of what’s next—was that we were almost running out of money. I thought this was just the first event that was going to kill my company, and that I was going to be another number in the statistics of failing companies. It took me a long time.

Now, four years later, with the same company (we pivoted), we were about to be acquired. That exact same situation I mentioned a few minutes ago—another company was about to acquire us, and they backed off two hours before signing the LOI. It took me only four hours to recover. What I did was take the LOI draft and kept shopping around with other companies. No one knew the acquiring company had backed off. In just two days, I had another company interested in buying our company, and we got lucky and sold it.

You see, that’s the difference in mindset. The only difference was in both situations, but it’s not just luck.

Shaheen: It’s not luck. You know what I mean? You can call it luck, but it was action and speed, right? You had an LOI, it fell through, so you took that LOI and brought it to other people who would be interested.

I’ve got a similar thing happening right now in my business. It’s the biggest deal I’ve ever done—maybe the biggest most people in B2B have done—and we’ve been working on it for about two years. It was supposed to launch last year, then an acquisition happened in this company, and they said, “Once the acquisition is complete, then we can launch.” They said after the New Year, the acquisition would be complete, and we’d launch. Today’s the ninth, and we have not launched.

So now what do I do? I take this and go to another company: “Hey, look, we were going to launch with these guys, but they’re dragging their feet, so I wanted to bring it to your attention.” That’s what you do, because otherwise, we’re just going to sit and wait and say, “Oh man, I wish we would have launched” or “Oh, I can’t believe they backed down.”

You’ve got two choices: you give up, or you get through it. That’s the difference between a real entrepreneur and a wannabe. The wannabes are the ones that throw in the towel and give up. Real entrepreneurs don’t fail in the first year because there is no way to fail unless they have the wrong product. But if they have the wrong product, they just pivot.

I had the wrong product when I started my company. The first 30 days we didn’t sell a thing—zero. I had a week of money left. We pivoted to a different product, and we were a profitable company within another 30 days. We could have easily been like, “Oh, the company didn’t work, the product didn’t work,” and gone to find a real job. I’ve been told that my whole life. I had one real job, and that was when I was 14. I worked at a pizza place. That was my only W-2 job ever. After that, I sold for Verizon 100% commission, then credit card processing and funding. I never had a real job. My mom always said—she stopped saying it maybe two years ago…

Mohamed: I came from the other side. I had three “real jobs” for a long enough time. But one thing I learned, and I would really encourage others to think about this, especially those working in big companies: once you have the taste of freedom, you’re not going to feel that a “real job” is real anymore. The taste of freedom means you do not have to have a manager to please, all due respect to those managers. You are now objectively working to solve a real problem in the market, and if you have a good product, everyone will buy it. You’re not going to get a promotion because someone likes you or not get it because someone dislikes you—all that politics. That makes you always on check, always mentally fit. Everything is in your control: you put in the work, you get the reward.

It’s a great thing. There’s a formula you can work with. I’m not saying working with big companies is a bad thing—they’re just different. Somebody’s got to do it at the end of the day.

Shaheen: 100%. For some people, that’s more suited. For example, my little brother was an entrepreneur. He started his first business in high school. We helped him start this scooter company. He was selling motorcycles and scooters and ATVs, and he grew it to a few stores. They were doing a few million, doing really well.

Then when he got his master’s degree, he decided, “I don’t want to work 24/7 on something I don’t really enjoy. I don’t really care. I like riding motorcycles, but I don’t enjoy running the store and doing oil changes. This is not for me.”

So Chewy is like, “Come work in our finance department. We’ll give you $250,000 a year.” He’s in the office a couple of days a week. These big companies nowadays, they’re hiring these young people, and they’ve got food courts and Starbucks and massage chairs and pool halls and video games. It’s like going to Disneyland when you go into these corporate offices! It’s a joke.

He loves it because he went from being an entrepreneur 24/7, go-go-go, and now he’s like, “Man, this is great. I get my work done in just a few hours, and then the rest of the week, I play pool and eat good food.” As long as he’s happy with it…

Mohamed: He’s loving it. I don’t think he’s going to be there forever. I think he’s way too smart and has a big impact that he can make on the economy and the world. I think he will do amazing things, but for right now, his kids are young, he gets to take them to school every day, see them every day as soon as they get home. It’s perfect for right now.

Shaheen: Absolutely. Think of it as a pit stop.

Mohamed: Exactly.

Shaheen: They’re not going to be in Seattle forever. All our family is here on the East Coast and in England. It’s an adventure for now. Daddy’s home all the time, he’s happy, he’s not working 24/7, they’re still living a good life, let them enjoy it and make the money.

So, Mo, you guys have been helping primarily companies in the tech space scale, get to a point where they can then exit, whether it’s going IPO or getting acquired by someone. You mentioned you had a new book that came out. Is there anything else that you have for our listeners and viewers that can help them within their entrepreneur journey or their business?

Mohamed: Absolutely. We’re building a community called Boundless Founder community (https://stg-boundlessfounder-rpd-3buu.uw2.rapydapps.cloud), and that community has tons of resources. These are either guides for entrepreneurs who are just getting started, to help them have a real check with themselves about their business and whether their business is going to grow or not, or whether entrepreneurship is for them or not. That’s just to get started.

But the community also has other courses and resources on how to take your business from just an idea to a multi-million dollar business, like sales training courses, marketing courses, and also sales acceleration tactics and strategies that we’re sharing with our community.

Specifically for your audience, we’re giving them a 20% discount. We’re going to send a code so that you can share it with them. We’re going to give them a 20% discount if they use that link and that code to join our community. I’m happy to have free sessions with some of them, maybe the first five that come to our community through you. We would like to see people be successful. That’s fulfilling for all of us.

Shaheen: Absolutely. Our success is when our clients are successful. I love that one thing about what we do is when our clients are successful, we become more successful. People ask, “Well, if they make more money, how do you make more money?” Well, if we help them make more money, they’re going to refer us to their friends and family and business partners. It always reciprocates. Whenever you help someone, you always get it back. It doesn’t matter what way you help someone, whether it’s business, whether it’s just being kind—it always comes back tenfold. It’s karma.

Mohamed: Exactly. Just for the sake of doing good, as you said, it’s going to come back to you. It can come in different ways. Not everything is in money. Sometimes people coming back and thanking you, feeling that you had a really positive impact on them—that’s worth a lot.

Imagine someone giving you $100,000 for a deal, but you feel they don’t want to talk with you again. Would that be something you want? Versus someone whom you’re not taking any money from, but they’re thanking you and they feel truly, deeply that you made an impact in their life. That’s what counts. There’s nothing more valuable.

Shaheen: Absolutely. Couldn’t agree more. Well, Mo, it’s been great talking to you today. It’s only 4 o’clock there in Seattle, right?

Mohamed: It is, yeah. Still, luckily, we still have some sunshine here. Today is sunny here.

Shaheen: It’s a little past dinner time, so I’m going to grab some dinner. I hope you have a great night, and I can’t wait to talk to you again soon. I’ll make sure everybody has the link so they can check out your community, and I’ll also put the link for the book in there. I can’t wait to hear about the other books that are coming out. It sounds like a great thing that you’re doing, man.

Mohamed: Thank you very much. I look forward to us chatting again.

Shaheen: Absolutely. Take care, Mo. Talk to you soon.